Neil Irwin

In conversations with a slew of business leaders about the economic implications of generative AI, a recurring theme cropped up: that AI-driven productivity gains are the world's best hope to limit the pain of a demographic squeeze. As computers get better at doing jobs humans have traditionally done, the risk of mass displacement of workers is created. But the flip side is an emerging shortage of working-age humans in most advanced economies and a murky future for globalization, which effectively expands the global pool of workers. The big macroeconomic question for the coming decade is wh

Large portions of the Republican caucus embrace a kind of policy nihilism. They criticize any piece of legislation that doesn’t completely accomplish conservative goals, but don’t build coalitions to devise complex legislation themselves. The roster of congressional Republicans includes lots of passionate ideological voices. It is lighter on the kind of wonkish, compromise-oriented technocrats who move bills. The years of lock-step Republican opposition to President Obama’s agenda is well known and rooted in ideology. But the aversion to doing the messy work of making policy really goes back further than that.

The last time congressional Republicans have done the major lifting of making domestic policy was President George Bush’s first term, a productive time that included an expansion of Medicare to cover prescription drugs, the No Child Left Behind education law, the Sarbanes-Oxley Act that reshaped securities law, and tax cuts in 2001 and 2003. But that’s now a decade and a half ago. Only 51 of the 238 current House Republicans were in Congress then — meaning a significant majority of Republican House members have never been in Congress at a time when their party was making major domestic policy. “The vast bulk of the Republican conference were elected on howls of protests against Obama’s agenda, but governing is a very different skill,” said Michael Steel, who was a top aide to former Speaker of the House John Boehner, and is now a managing director at Hamilton Place Strategies. “It requires a different kind of muscle, and that muscle has atrophied.”

Before the term “fake news” became an all-purpose insult for news coverage a person doesn’t like, it had a more specific meaning: stories invented from whole cloth, designed to attract social shares and web traffic by flattering the prejudices of their intended audience. Think of untrue claims like the Donald Trump endorsement by Pope Francis or the investigation of the Clinton Foundation for running a pedophile sex ring. In the immediate aftermath of the election, there was even some speculation that these types of stories were enough to swing the result toward Donald J Trump.

Some new research from two economists throws at least a bit of cold water on the theory that false news was a major influence on the election result. They offer some hard data on how pervasive voters’ consumption of fake news really was during the 2016 election cycle. The research also reveals some disturbing truths about the modern media environment and how people make sense of the incoming gush of news.

[Commentary] In every modern society, the people who hold the levers of state power control the deployment of vast riches; every decision about a change in the tax code or the issuance of oil drilling licenses is worth billions to someone.

The potential beneficiaries of those policies have every incentive in the world to try to influence the decisions.

Influence peddling is the mechanism by which those hoping to sway politicians ultimately reward those politicians. Whether it is ethical or unethical, legal or illegal, depends on what particular compromises a given country has come to accept.

China has had a system in which the understanding is that legal authorities will take a don’t-ask-don’t-tell approach to family members of high political officials making vast sums. The prosecution of Zhou’s family is a frontal assault on that understanding of what is official corruption.

In the United States, the basic compact has been this: If you take financial benefits from a private interest that seeks to influence policy while in office, it is probably illegal. It’s the same if a close family member does it.

The influence games are different in Washington and Beijing, of course. And not all corruption is created equal; it matters whether a particular variety of official corruption drags down a country’s economy. At the worst extreme, a country where public officials at all levels demand constant bribes as a matter of course will not be a very hospitable environment for business.

But as the Columbia economist Ray Fisman has argued, so long as corruption is predictable and manageable, it can coexist with speedy economic growth (Indonesia under Suharto and China over the last few decades are prime examples). And China has greater state control over more of the economy, and little transparency around who is profiting from that control and why. That is a breeding ground for potential corruption on a scale unknown in the United States.